I recently went into BB to buy a receiver and was watching a Samsung Demo Disc spinning on a Samsung Blu ray player and was totally unimpressed with the PQ I saw on the 42" LCD that was displaying the image. On the disc there were other sample of movies I checked out that looked very good, particularly the cartoons. But the sample of the movie Batman Begins was not impressive at all considering that I've seen the movie broadcast on my HDTV and on my A2 HD DVD player. My initial reaction was some uninformed moron was running a SD DVD version of Batman Begins on the BD player. But then I popped the player open and to my surprise discovered it was a Samsung Blu ray Disc Sample. Has anyone else notices this before? BTW! The same disc had a sampling of POTC as well and even that I was not that blown away PQ wise.

What gives? I don't believe too many shoppers in the HD market will be that impressed with what I saw.

Not to sound like I'm defending Blu-Ray however I would not base any buying decision on what I have seen in a large generalist store - most of the time (based on my experiance) the screens and players have not been set up right.

Example would be an upscaling DVD player (Samsung I think) linked to a 50" screen (unsure of brand) in Currys in the UK. I was talking to an assistant and he was demonstrating the system to me and of all the options (420p, 580p(?), 720p and 1080i) they had it set on the 580p (not sure if it was 580 but definately a 500 option) and the set looked terrible, but when it was changed to 720p it actually looked quite good

I recently went into BB to buy a receiver and was watching a Samsung Demo Disc spinning on a Samsung Blu ray player and was totally unimpressed with the PQ I saw on the 42" LCD that was displaying the image. On the disc there were other sample of movies I checked out that looked very good, particularly the cartoons. But the sample of the movie Batman Begins was not impressive at all considering that I've seen the movie broadcast on my HDTV and on my A2 HD DVD player. My initial reaction was some uninformed moron was running a SD DVD version of Batman Begins on the BD player. But then I popped the player open and to my surprise discovered it was a Samsung Blu ray Disc Sample. Has anyone else notices this before? BTW! The same disc had a sampling of POTC as well and even that I was not that blown away PQ wise.

What gives? I don't believe too many shoppers in the HD market will be that impressed with what I saw.
That PotC isn't the encode from Disney, it came out months before and is pretty ******. The BB I don't know where they got their source from considering it's not available, but it's more than likely not the final version which will appear. Kinda silly that they don't take the time on the demos to show the system at it's best, but they didn't.

Retail stores do a horrendous job calibrating their sets as a rule. They want them to "pop," which means too much contrast, too much color and to give the illusion of larger screen-size, overscannig.

I agree, you cannot trust the image of any TV which was setup by retail employees.

However at a local Circuit City, I saw a Sony display recently which was setup by the Sony Reps and running PotC2 on Blu-Ray at 1080p on a 56" screen that looked spectacular.

Perfect color temp, saturation, balance and some of the best image quality I have ever seen.

Frankly if every HDM display at a major retailer looked like that one then I imagine quite a few more people would have become early adopters to HDM this past year.

also just b/c it's running off a bd player on a 1080p screen doesnt mean it's actually ran at 1080p. i've seen some setups where they had one bd player running to 2 tv's, one using hdmi and another using component. i wouldnt be surprised if 1080p/24 function isnt even turned on in some of the players.

the batman begins demo i saw at the local best buy in sugar land, tx looked pretty nice.

Prehapps the wrong cable. Maybe when setup they used the composite cables or had it set to 480p. Who knows.

My local BB has their A30 running an SD Bestbuy demo disc. Quite frustrating as it makes it look like crap.

Like I wrote. Some of the sample movies looked excellent on that Samsung Demo Disc. But other looked like crap. Before I make any judgment I checked to make sure of my facts. This DB player was connected via HDMI to the LCD. And honestly most of the DD and CC I've visited do connect their HDTVs with the right cables. They sometime just don't make all the setting correctly internally. POTC looked very good. But not as outstanding as I'd expected though from what I've read in this forum.

Still! I find it peculiar that some still refuse to admit that sometime things don't always appear the way they're suppose to like when Samsung introduced the first DB player and it was found to produce less than spectacular DB resolution.